It appears that I signed up to speak at the San Diego SQL Saturday coming up this weekend. I knew that I had signed up for something, but I thought it was a treasure hunt for Carmen Sandiego. I’ve always wondered where in the world she is. And it seems fitting that she’d be in San Diego. Naw, really.. I’m headed there to attend the SQL Saturday, I figure it’s about time I actually leave an airport in California and what better reason that to share some SQL Server knowledge, network, and hang out with some good friends.

If you aren’t familiar with SQL Saturday events, they are a one-day free training event. You get to hear from local and national speakers about numerous topics relating to SQL Server and developing your career. And on the developing your career standpoint, they are an excellent opportunity to network with professionals in the area and possibly make that connection that may provide the solution to your next technical issue.

I have a few sessions at the event this weekend that I hope you will stop in to check out. Or at least stop by and say hello. My sessions are:

Extended Events, Work Smarter Not Harder – There are many ways to performance monitor your SQL Server environment. In this session we’ll review Extended Events, which is one of the newer SQL Server monitoring platforms. Learn the ins and outs of how to get detailed information on the errors and events that occur within SQL Server and how to dig into the information. With a few T-SQL statements, issues that could take weeks to research can be investigated in minutes.

Discovering the Plan Cache – Execution plans are stored after execution in the plan cache. This metadata about how queries are executed can provide insight into how your SQL Server environment is functioning. By using XQuery to browse and search the plan cache you can find potential performance issues and opportunities to tune your queries. This information can be used to help reduce issues related to parallelism, shift queries from using scans to using seek operations, or discover exactly which queries are using what indexes. All of this and more is readily available through the plan cache. In this session we will explore the plan cache and start you on the road to discovery.

I should also be in Thomas LaRock’s (Blog | @SQLRockstar) session helping out with the demonstrations:

Choose Your Own Adventure: Performance Tuning - Life is all about choices, and when it comes to SQL Server it is no different. If you don’t have a methodology for researching questions and resolving issues then you need to get one, and soon. Join Microsoft MVP Thomas LaRock from Confio Software as he helps guide you while YOU make the choices in this interactive performance tuning adventure.

When I am not in sessions, I’ll be manning the PASS Community Zone talking to people about the SQL Server community. And maybe wearing, or in possession of, a unicorn mask.